People sometimes ask me if there are any attributes or patterns of behavior that can lead to success in online retail and blogging.

From what I have seen of the market, three characteristics are vital to success in any online or real world endeavor. Those characteristics can be summed up as passion, patience, and persistence. Persons without those qualities almost never succeed because they almost always give up.

The three characteristics you will need to succeed online are passion, patience, and persistence.

Passion – This is the most important of the three because it gives you the energy to develop the other two. If you want to get anywhere online, you must love what you are doing. You must want to look forward to sitting down at the computer and banging away for the sheer pleasure of it. I love writing and enjoy online commerce and blogging, so I have a passion for those activities. I also find that I make the most money from the things that I enjoy and generally do not make a cent on stuff I consider a chore. A good rule of thumb is that if you are not enjoying what you are doing and looking forward to doing it, you need to find something else to do.

Patience – Contrary to popular belief, it takes a lot of time to build up an online business. Results do not come overnight. Generally, it will take six months to a year to get meaningful results after you go live with a website. It can sometimes take longer. Results in online sales can be a little quicker, but they are often painfully slow as well. I have had items sit online for well over a year until they sold. The most successful online entrepreneurs are those with the most patience; it took Jack Ma over a decade to build up Alibaba. Jeff Bezos has spent 20 years building Amazon.com. You will have to have patience to wait for results.

Persistence – Jack Ma and Jeff Bezos became billionaires because they were just plain stubborn, not because they were visionaries. Lots of other people had the same vision about e-commerce back in the 1990s. The difference was that most of those people simply gave up. Jack and Jeff just kept plugging and plodding away. If you want to be successful, you will have to go online every day and try. This is where patience and passion come in. You’ll need the patience to wait for results and passion to keep trying even if you see no visible results.

You’ll need other traits too, including courage, creativity, intelligence, curiosity, insight, and faith, but I find that passion, patience, and persistence are the big three. Those other traits are often useless without the three that I just named.

Something else I’ve found is that achieving even a little success can help build those qualities in an online entrepreneur. Making a few sales or attracting some hits to your blog can make you feel passionate about what you are doing. Seeing some meaningful results gives you the hope you need to go on and the energy you need to keep trying.

Generally, if you try and keep trying, you will develop those qualities, but if you start giving up, you will lose those important behaviors and start programming yourself for failure.